


lying trauma

by PlacentaMilk



Category: The Darkest Minds Series - Alexandra Bracken
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, I might add more to this, Luby, also, and why wouldn't she?, but ill keep it open for now, god hasn't she had enough, i finished the books last night and really, i havent decided, just wanted to write something small and good for my babes, lol, really - Freeform, really just, ruby deserves some good, ruby has ptsd, thats so fucking obvious in the last book, their ship name is
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-14 10:42:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16911438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlacentaMilk/pseuds/PlacentaMilk
Summary: “It is sometimes said that the sword wears out the scabbard. That is my history. My passions have made me live, and my passions have killed me.”





	lying trauma

**Author's Note:**

> or, you could read this as, ruby has ptsd and gets nightmares, but mostly she just blames herself for the things she's done. i wouldn't really reccommend reading this if you haven't read all the books, it wouldn't really make sense/and/or/might spill the plot beans on you.
> 
> also i only write in third person so trying to force myself to write how alexandra bracken writes was a challenge but i think it's better, what with how she wrote her books.

I woke up with a crack resounding throughout the room and my head spinning to the side, the blow stinging the side of my head. "Good, you're finally awake," someone hissed, the smell of bleach and vomit and blood surrounding me. God, I was in so much pain. It was like I couldn't tell where one pain started and another ended, they all just bled into each other, the blows on my skull, the zip ties around my wrists and ankles. My body ached in pain, and my entire left leg was dead, numb.

I rolled my head back from where I was previously slumped and leaned back, eyes blinking against the harsh lights hanging above me. Concrete walls, ceiling, floor. Harsh bright lights, the smell of bleach and nightmares lurking in the corners of the room. I was in Thurmond. Right, fuck, of course I was in Thurmond, I had just-

This time the crack that went through the room was much louder, and as I felt the hit against my jaw, I closed my eyes and bit down reflexively, all but biting a hole through my tongue. I immediately released the tension in my jaw with a cry of pain, eyes snapping open and looking at the PSF enforcer in front of me. I was in Thurmond. I was in Thurmond and I wasn't done with what I needed to do, I had to walk out of here.

_I want to live._

I started struggling against the zip ties keeping me in place, wanting to reach down and tear them off with my own teeth but finding that they had put a muzzle on me. When had they done that? Didn't he just hit me across the jaw with his hand? The plastic surely would've taken the blunt force of it.

I looked down at his hand as the thought crossed my mind. Stun baton. Not hand.

"Who sent you?" He asked, noticing that my attention was finally on him, but his voice was fading. He continued talking, I saw his lips moving but anything he said was drowned out.

God, I could barely think past the pain aching through my body. I wanted to whimper, to scream, to float back into that unconscious space I was in where nothing hurt. My leg was starting to wake up and it screamed with a voice of its own, feeling like it was on fire.

I said something, something that made him angry, I know that much. He had produced a small white charm off of a keychain, except it wasn't a charm at all, and the minute he clicked the button the noise in my head skyrocketed and not only was my leg on fire, so was my brain. I screamed, loudly, but even I couldn't hear myself over the White Noise. My body shook with it, my eyes rolling into the back of my head but it wasn't like I could see anyway. I was blind, lost in pain.

The chair underneath me tipped back and fell away, my shoulders taking the brunt of the fall and the back of my head cracking wickedly against the concrete floor. Colors blossomed in front of my eyes, and I wondered, for just a split second, if this was how the PSF soldier planned to kill me. No false promises of keeping me alive if I gave him information, no choices between the gun holstered in his belt or the White Noise. Simply this, letting my brain melt out of my ears.

I felt something hot and wet trail out of my right ear and down, into my hair. Blood. The fingers pushing at my skull, my temples, shouting to be let out finally broke free and grabbed ahold of the nearest, weakest mind.

It wasn't the pain that woke me up, or the fear. It was remembering that I had controlled the guard in the corner of the room to use his gun and kill the man who had raised his baton to smash into my broken leg.

 _"-kay, wake up, you're fine,"_ was whispered softly into my ear as I was woken up. Liam hadn't woken me up violently, but from the way I jolted up from where I had been laying and how I had gasped for breath, I might as well have been. It felt like I was just plunged into ice cold water after staying in the fire too long, and my body still ached as if I had just escaped from Thurmond for the second and final time.

_Phantom pains._

As I looked next to me, to a Liam I had obviously just woken up, I remembered what Vida had said when I told Chubs one night about the nightmares and how I could always vividly remember the pain after I woke up, oversensitive. _"Yeah, I get them, about the fight we had with that red. I can still feel the flames licking at the back of my neck, singing my hair sometimes."_

"You're fine, darlin', no one here but me," Liam murmured next to me, patting my hair, my shoulder, my cheek, just about any place he could reach. It's clear he was restraining himself from just pulling me into his arms, wanting me to calm down. "You aren't there. You're here with me, and I'm not gonna let anything bad happen to you."

But the worst had already happened, hadn't it?

I breathed harshly, trying to suck air in through my nose, hold it, and then let it out through my mouth. He didn't need to push my head between my knees to keep me from hyperventilating, I wasn't that far deep into it. I nodded, short and curt, really a jerk of the chin more than anything else. Right, I wasn't back in Thurmond with the certainty of death hanging over my head like a rusty and heavy knife, I was here, in a tent with Liam on the beach. As if he could read my mind, he unzipped the door to the tent just a little, just enough to let the smell of the ocean breeze drift in.

I closed my eyes and focused on it, turning in Liam's hands and bowing my head towards him, looking for a warm and sturdy chest to rest my head on. He got my intentions and scooted closer, tension draining out of his shoulders as his arms linked around my waist and pulled me closer to him. I laid my head in the space where his shoulder met his chest, right in the crook of his neck, and I just breathed. I breathed in the salty ocean from outside, I breathed in Liam's scent, from the shampoo and soap his uses, his sweat-dried skin from the heat inside the blankets, down to just _him_.

He shifted until he was leaning back against a mound of our pillows and I was practically on top of him, welcoming his embrace on my frayed edges, the hands trailing up and down my back and the fingers combing through my hair. He turned and kissed the top of my head every once in a while, humming a tune to a song we'd heard on the road. He waited until... I don't know, really. I never knew what he waited for. For my muscles to not be so bunched up? For my breathing to even out? For my body to switch off the "high-alert" button? Whatever it was, he waited each time for that, and only then did he ask, "What dream was it?"

Because there was always the question of if I was okay, but of course I wasn't.

I shook my head because he was probably thinking of the one with Jude, but it wasn't that. "I was..." I cleared my throat, "back in Thurmond. In the cell."

He nodded, as if he knew, and maybe he had a gist - he had been the one to see me fall out of the window desperately, anyway - but I never really told him all of what happened there. Liam rubs the hand that was stroking my back down, past my hip, my thigh which is hitched up, tucked up to both of our sides while my other leg was straight down, all the way to my calve where he started to work his fingers into the muscle there, lightly. That was the leg that had broken. "It wasn't the pain that made it a nightmare," that was a blatant lie, but it also wasn't, "it was..."

It was the part I never told him. Not that time, or any of the other times. I told him about how in the League I used my powers to get into peoples memories, to find out information, but he didn't know. Not fully, of what I'd become. I liked to believe I was no Clancy Gray, but that's exactly who I had become in the end, hadn't I? Had the ends justified the means?

I didn't know the answer to that question.

Liam waited for me to speak and it was only a minute later that I realized I had gotten lost in my thoughts, because how could I tell him about the awful things I'd done? How could I-

I was getting upset again. He could tell I was working myself up from the inside out and he switched the conversation by not switching it at all. He let it go, hand coming up from my calve to grip at the back of my thigh, keeping it hitched up, and that was that. He started humming a tune again, thumb rubbing back and forth on the bare skin of my leg, and I was glad. I was so terribly glad to smother the dark thoughts that plagued me into the ground, to just stay here, content, in his arms. "I love you," is all I could whisper, to show my thanks. I gave him a kiss right where my face was resting because he deserved that, and so much more than I could give him.

I practically felt the corners of his lips tug upwards into a small smile as he hummed his tune, eyes half-lidded against the darkness of the tent. "I love you too, darlin'."

He did.


End file.
